This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

The tragic cliché of the heroic hockey enforcer is explored with art and impact in this powerful feature debut by Vancouver writer/director Kevan Funk.

Nominated for four Candys at this week’s Canadian Screen Awards, Best Motion Picture among them, Hello Destroyer brings documentary realism to the dramatic story of minor league bruiser Tyson Burr (Jared Abrahamson).

Article Continued Below

As a new recruit to the Prince George Warriors, Tyson is eager to please his meat-eating coach Dale Milbury (Kurt Max Runte), who counsels winning at all costs: “This is why we burn and bleed — to achieve greatness.”

But when Tyson’s exuberance sends an opposing player to hospital with life-altering brain and spine injuries, the coach and other team officials shift from high-fiving to finger-pointing. Tyson is put on “indefinite suspension” while lawyers shimmy.

“Indefinite” translates as the ostracizing of dazed Tyson, who is as inarticulate as he is ill-equipped to deal with public shunning. Abrahamson manifests his character’s grief with almost wordless self-loathing and a barely contained rage that recalls Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea. Funk doesn’t stint on the loaded metaphors. Tyson spends his days in the wilderness working at an abbatoir and tearing down an old house, his interior torment underlined by cinematographer Benjamin Loeb’s artfully claustrophobic close-ups. The one person who befriends Tyson is an indigenous man (Joe Dion Buffalo), who understands social disenfranchisement all too well.

It’s all legit, though, considering the circumstances. And Funk is equally capable of critical understatement, as when the concept of “home” turns hypocritical in scenes set before and after Tyson’s fall from grace.

Players are told by their coach that they have to loyally beat up the visiting opposing team because “It’s our house, for f---’s sake.” The fans expect it.

But when it all goes terribly wrong, remorseful Tyson is asked by the worried family billeting him to vacate the premises because “this is our home.” He might set a bad example to their young son, eh?

The film’s most powerful moment is completely inferred: a barely heard singing of “O Canada” at a televised hockey game seems sorrowful rather than triumphal.

Shirley MacLaine is almost too good at being a curmudgeon in this manipulative tale of redemption by Mark Pellington (Arlington Road).

By the time MacLaine’s character Harriet shows real humanity, all sympathy for her character’s loneliness has long since vanished.

A wealthy small-town retiree, Harriet, 81, uses her wealth and power to bully her own employees and also those of tiny local newspaper The Bristol Gazette. When a near-death experience suggests she’s fated to be remembered badly, Harriet orders the Gazette’s obituary writer Anne (Amanda Seyfried) to commence work on a laudatory eulogy.

Anne initially balks, not just because Harriet “puts the bitch in obituary,” but because she can’t find anyone to say anything nice about her. It’s time for a bonding road trip, with precocious moppet Brenda (AnnJewel Lee Dixon) in tow.

Locked on autopilot for a Hollywood ending, the movie glosses over a scene where Harriet insults and then fires a woman, whose job she then steals. Once a monster, always a monster — and wouldn’t that story arc have made for better use of MacLaine’s considerable talents?

"Antarctica: Ice and Sky," directed by "March of the Penguins" filmmakers, tracks the work of polar scientist Claude Lorius. (Supplied photo)

March of the Penguins filmmaker Luc Jacquet returns to the frozen continent for an arresting and urgent doc that warns rather than charms.

Using archival and recent footage, Jacquet tracks the work of pioneering polar scientist Claude Lorius, a climate change verifier whose astounding discoveries should silence all deniers.

Now in his 80s, Lorius has been visiting and studying Antarctica since 1956, when he and two other researchers spent a year on the ice studying it. Initially there to map the vast land mass, he and his fellow scientists (whom we barely get to know) became interested in the composition of the frozen water at their feet.

Lorius developed a method of dating ice, using drilled core samples up to 400,000 years old, that prove rising global temperatures of the past century are caused by man, not nature.

Science has given us the ability “to unearth and see what is normally invisible,” Lorius says. The film will hopefully prompt a lot more people to look harder at the mounting evidence that global warming is a clear and present danger.

Japanese-Canadian filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming was motivated by social and political unrest as she made her animated film "Window Horses," featuring the voices of Sandra Oh, Ellen Page and Don McKellar. (Supplied photo)

Rosie Ming is a francophile who’s never been to France, a budding poet and a young woman with some abandonment issues.

Caught between cultures, her late mother’s, her long-lost father’s (Iranian) and her native country — she’s a born and bred Vancouverite — Rosie has loads of intellectual curiosity and a touch of attitude. It makes her an interesting and appealing protagonist.

When Rosie is invited to a poetry conference in Shiraz, Iran, where her father is from, it allows her to deal with one of the great unresolved issues of her life: why did her dad abandon the family when she was 7?

The variety of animation styles are well executed and there’s some lovely poetry. The voice work is sublime, especially Sandra Oh as Rosie and Don McKellar has some droll moments as the arch Dietmar, a fellow poet.

Isabelle Huppert as Michele in a scene from the movie "Elle," directed by Paul Verhoeven. (Guy Ferrandis)

Isabelle Huppert’s furious energy powers this rape revenge thriller by Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Showgirls). No stranger to excess or controversy, Verhoeven seeks adrenalin junkies and avid discussion with this film, which screenwriter David Birke adapts from a popular French novel.

Oscar-nominated for her performance, Huppert plays Michèle, the steely CEO of a Paris videogame company specializing in medieval rape and murder fantasies, one of many disturbing art vs. life ironies in the film. The violence comes home after she is raped in her abode by a masked stranger.

Michèle is accustomed to being judged by others — lurid headlines speak to past family horror — and she’s not easily rattled by complicated social interactions that include her demanding lover, reckless mother, needy adult son and useless ex-husband.

Equal parts sexploitation drama, social satire and empowerment fantasy, Elle leaves us unsure of what we’re watching and how to respond. The film challenges genre conventions and also notions of the “correct” response to sexual assault. Extras include a making-of featurette and a short doc celebrating Huppert’s career.

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com